The
war in Iraq is a mistake. No its worse than a mistake. Lets quit pussy-footing
around and call it like it is. The war in Iraq is a grand profiteering
scheme gone awry and Americans need to take off their blinders and face
the truth.

As the cost of the war leaves
a deeper black hole of debt for our great-grandchildren, people need
to ask themselves whether the hundreds of billions spent thus far have
helped anyone other than reconstruction companies and defense contractors.
It takes no thought, the answer is no.

And after that, to paraphrase
a powerful John Kerry comment from the Viet Nam era, Americans need
think about which soldier will be the last to die for this mistake.

Day in and day out, Bush
is on TV saying we will not withdraw from Iraq. How much longer will
Americans put up with this bumbling idiot?

The rumblings for impeachment
are getting louder and for good reason. The British memo released this
week on Bush's conversation with Tony Blair in January 2003, not only
proves that Bush planned to take the country to war using whatever lies
he deemed necessary, it also proves that there was no plan for post-war
Iraq.

Bush is throwing good money
after bad like a compulsive gambler, as our troops get sucked deeper
and deeper into a bloody quagmire. The situation in Iraq has elevated
beyond a disaster and all Bush wants to do is sink more tax dollars
into the same failed policies that brought us to this point.

Over the past 6 months, we
have heard a lot of accusations about "revisionist history"
from Bush and his minions in answer to those who dare to question whether
there ever was a real threat from Iraq.

However, there is an abundance
of evidence that administration officials sought to portray Iraq as
a deadly threat to the American people in the run-up to war. But as
we now know, there is a great difference between the hand-picked intelligence
that was presented to Congress and the American people when compared
to what was actually in Iraq.

Americans were fed a fairy
tale about fighting a war of liberation that would be short, cheap,
and bloodless. The Bush administration was like a pied piper as it lead
the nation into the Iraq disaster.

In hindsight, what is particularly
troublesome is how naively the nation followed.

Looking back, there were
countless examples of provocative rhetoric as they lead the country
to war in Iraq. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush coined
the phrase "Axis of Evil," while pointing at Iraq, Iran, and
North Korea.

In October 2002, the White
House Press Secretary said regime change in Iraq could be accomplished
with "the cost of one bullet."

On March 17, in his final
speech to the American people before the invasion, Bush took one last
opportunity to bolster his case for war. The centerpiece of his argument
was the same message he brought to the UN months before, and the same
message he hammered home at every opportunity in the intervening months,
namely that Saddam had failed to destroy the WMDs and presented an imminent
danger to the American people.

"Intelligence gathered
by this and other governments," he said, "leaves no doubt
that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most
lethal weapons ever devised."

In a public address on March
19, 2003, Bush told the world: "Our nation enters this conflict
reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States
and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime
that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."

Three years have passed,
and the US has yet to find a single shred of evidence to confirm the
official reason that our country was sent to war; namely, that Iraq's
WMDs constituted a grave threat to the US.

On January 28, 2003, Bush
said in his State of the Union Address: "The British government
has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities
of uranium from Africa."

We now know that the CIA
said that claim was false as early as March 2002 and that the International
Atomic Energy Agency had also discredited the allegation. But they just
went ahead and used it anyways.

On February 5, Colin Powell
told the United Nations Security Council: "Our conservative estimate
is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical
weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets."

In a radio address on February
8, 2003, Bush told the nation: "We have sources that tell us that
Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical
weapons - the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."

The fact is, after 3 years,
we have not found any of these items, nor have we found those thousands
of rockets loaded with chemical weapons.

On March 30, 2003, Rumsfeld
said in an interview on This Week, of the search for WMDs: "We
know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and
east, west, south, and north somewhat."

However, Baghdad fell on
April 9, 2003, and Tikrit on April 14, 2003, and the intelligence Rumsfeld
spoke of has not led to any WMDs.

Whether or not intelligence
reports were bent, stretched, or fabricated to make Iraq look like an
imminent threat, it is clear that the administration's rhetoric played
upon the fear of the American people about future terrorism attacks.

But, under close scrutiny,
most of the statements had nothing to do with intelligence; the were
merely designed to prey on public fear. Through smoke and mirrors, the
face of bin Laden was morphed into that of Saddam. Bush himself blurred
the image in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union Address when he
said:

"Imagine those 19 hijackers
with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by Saddam Hussein.
It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country
to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

Not only did the administration
warn about more hijackers carrying deadly chemicals, it even went so
far as to say that in the time it would take for UN inspectors to find
'smoking gun' evidence of Saddam's illegal weapons, the US was at risk
of a nuclear attack.

Condoleeza Rice by the Los
Angeles Times, was quoted as saying on September 9, 2002: "We don't
want the 'smoking gun' to be a mushroom cloud."

Talk about fabrication, where
did the term mushroom cloud come from? What was this statement based
on?

On September 26, 2002, just
two weeks before Congress voted on a resolution, Bush himself pushed
the case that Iraq was plotting to attack the US. After meeting with
members of Congress that day, Bush said:

"The danger to our country
is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses
biological and chemical weapons.... The regime is seeking a nuclear
bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year."

These are his words. Bush
said Saddam is "seeking a nuclear bomb." Has he ever produced
any evidence to back up this allegation? No. And, his rhetoric continued
that day in the Rose Garden, where he said:

"The dangers we face
will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore
these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized
it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies.
By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate
the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime
gives anthrax or VX - nerve gas - or some day a nuclear weapon to a
terrorist ally."

And yet, 3 years later, we
have not seen a shred of evidence to support this claim of grave dangers,
chemical weapons, links to al Qaeda, or nuclear weapons.

Four days before a vote on
the resolution, on October 7, 2002, Bush ramped up the scare tactics
and stated: "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network
share a common enemy - the United States of America. We know that Iraq
and al Qaeda have had high-level
contacts that go back a decade."

Bush then went even further
by saying: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members
in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.... Alliance with terrorists
could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

During his speech at the
Cincinnati Museum Center, he also elaborated on Iraq's nuclear program
and said:

"The evidence indicates
that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein
has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he
calls his 'nuclear mujahideen' - his nuclear holy warriors.... If the
Iraqi regime is able to
produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little
larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less
than a year."

This is the kind of outrageous
rhetoric that was given to the American people to justify war with Iraq.
This is the same kind of hyped fabricated evidence that was given to
Congress to sway its vote on October 11, 2002.

And most importantly these
are examples of the same kind charges that the Bush administration now
tries to say were never made, like we're deluded idiots.

Saddam is no longer in power.
But in reality, so what? The Iraqis are worse off. They still don't
even have the basic necessities of life like clean water, sanitation
provisions, and electricity. They've had to watch family members imprisoned,
tortured, and killed for 3 years without Saddam in charge.

And our soldiers are still
dying in record numbers. Not a day goes by that there is not another
attack on the troops who are saddled with trying to restore order to
a country on the brink of anarchy.

Bush told the American people
that we were compelled to go to war to secure our country from a grave
threat. Are we safer today than we were on March 18, 2003?

For the first time in history,
the US went to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country
posed a grave threat to our nation. We should accept nothing less than
a full-scale, wide-open Congressional investigation into the issue of
pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq.

It is in the compelling national
interest to examine what we were told about the threat from Iraq to
determine once and for all whether the intelligence was faulty or distorted.

The purpose of such an investigation
is not to engage in "revisionist history." It is to get at
the truth. The American people have valid questions that deserve to
be answered.

(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist
for Independent Media TV and an investigative journalist focused on
exposing corruption in government. He can be reached at evelyn.pringle@sbcglobal.net)